By Alex Hardiman, Head of News Product, and Campbell Brown, Head of News Partnerships
Local news helps people connect to their communities about the issues that are closest to home. Earlier this year, we announced a change in the US to prioritize local news so people can see topics that have a direct impact on their community and discover what’s happening in their local area.
Today, we’re expanding that update to people in all countries, in all languages. Now, people around the world will see more news on Facebook from local sources covering their current city and other cities they may care about.
What This Means for Local Publishers
With this update, we’re helping local publishers who cover multiple, nearby cities reach audiences in those cities. We’ll consider a publisher as local to multiple cities if the people in those cities are more likely than the people outside of those cities to read articles from the publisher’s domain. By expanding the scope of what may be considered local to people, we’re including other cities that people may care about and connecting people to local publishers from those cities.
We’ll continue our work to prioritize high quality news in News Feed, including news from sources that are broadly trusted, informative and relevant to local communities. We look forward to improving and expanding these efforts this year.